Disk Space Fan: Analyze your hard drive and enjoy eye candy at the same time

There are many, many programs out there that serve the purpose of analyzing your hard drive usage (such as O&O DiskStat which was recently just posted about on dotTech). So, for a analyze-hard-drive program to stand out, it needs to be able to do something *special*. Disk Space Fan is one such software that “stands out above the crowd” not necessarily by providing unique, advanced features, but rather by presenting itself with a fair dab of eye candy which seems to be lacking in many programs nowadays.

This is what the main program window of Disk Space Fan looks like:

Right off the bat, without even having to do anything more than running the program, you are presented with an eye pleasing interface with bright colors and well designed graphics. To get started you must select the partition you want to scan – or a specific folder – and click the “Scan for Details” button. Scanning is not particularly fast – took about one minute to scan my whole C:/ partition – but is not really slow either.

After the scan has finished, the results of the scan are shown to you:

Sticking true to the theme, the results also prove to be an anti-eyesore with a nice list of largest folders or files (folders are the ones that are in color; files are the ones that are in gray) and a fantastic graphical representation of used hard drive space. Both the list and graphic are interactive in the sense that you can click on items in the last/graph and explore in further detail the contents of the folder in question (you may also click on files, but you won’t get any “extra” information since a file… is just a file). The point worth noting, though, is the terrifically smooth transitions that are used to move from folder-to-folder – you have to try it out yourself to know what I mean.

Now, eye candy aside, the main purpose of Disk Space Fan is to help you manage your hard drive. So, in that regard, Disk Space Fan allows you to interact with Windows Explorer doing actions such as delete files/folders, explore them, view properties, etc.:

(“Goto root” brings you back to the root directory, such as C:/)

Furthermore, to help with user friendliness, when delving deeper into folders and subfolders, you can use the two arrows located at the top left of the program window to go “back” and “forward”, similar to how “back” and “forward” work in web browsers. There is also the “home” key that brings you back to the main program window and allows you to scan a different partition/folder altogether.

However, no program is “perfect”, right? There are two caveats to Disk Space Fan:

When hovering your mouse over the graph, the tooltips that appear have a very small – but noticeable – lag time before they appear; this caveat is small but worth noting. (Do note that while there is a small lag associated with tooltips appearing, the graph transitions are totally lag free.)

The program window for Disk Space Fan is not resizeable aside from maximize or not-maximize, and maximizing the program window is a bit buggy – it does funky things which I don’t have words to describe.

Last but not least, Disk Space Fan is a freeware program that has a commercial Pro version if users want to shell out $19.95 to purchase it. Disk Space Fan – the freeware one – really only does everything that I have mentioned above; there aren’t very many “bells and whistles” in terms of features. Disk Space Fan Pro, however, does provide a little bit more bang-for-the-buck:

Scans directories and drives to find duplicate files

Criteria for comparison of files can be easily set up (file name, size, creation date and content)

You can exclude files based on file type, size and location

Provides a list of identical files so you can select which ones you want to delete

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About Ashraf

Happily married to the most beautiful woman ever, Ashraf is the founder of dotTech. Ashraf spends insane hours on dotTech (usually writing articles but sometimes doing absolutely nothing except staring). Yes he is weird, but he is also very friendly.

Cod Head

I use the freeware version of disk space fan and it helped me get rid of a lot of junk.I had Orange ISP pre installed on my computer that I thought I had deleted but this found a lot of its stuff.I also had a game that I got rid of called purple place,I even deleted the folders for these programs but disk space fan found lots of their junk and other stuff I never knew I had.Just be careful not to delete any system components.If in doubt,don’t delete it.

Ron

Nice…reminds me of a freeware called Scanner that I ran into years ago. It can be run without installing, but the zip includes a reg key to add it to the context menu. 165K download: http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/

tejas

This is really cool. I love eye candy! You mentioned that maximize “does funky things which I don’t have words to describe”. Maximize doesn’t do anything funky on my machine, it just makes the window bigger, but it’s no where near maximized. Not a problem though….
Thanks Ashraf!

Joji

It was pretty good… but I had to re-image my laptop, so the product key no longer worked. I emailed the support team about it and they provided me with another key! :D

For those who want to try what I did, don’t do it; don’t lie to Disk Space Fan that this and that happened when it didn’t. I only got the key again 2-3 weeks after the giveaway happened… which was reasonable enough to them I guess.

The good thing is that the key will still be hidden on your system after uninstallation unless you re-image your computer.